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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →In June 2017, Shanghai-based Clobotics said it had raised $5 million in seed funding and opened a research and development center in Redmond, Washington. The company’s initial focus was wind-turbine inspection: using sensor-equipped drones to collect images and software to identify maintenance issues. The funding and office announcement is historical; a separate $5 million financing round followed in January 2018.
What Clobotics announced in 2017
GeekWire reported on June 26, 2017, that Clobotics had raised $5 million in a seed round led by GGV Capital and opened a Seattle-area R&D center in Redmond. At the time, the company said it had 35 employees, five of them at the Redmond operation. Those figures describe the company in 2017, not its current staffing or office operations. GeekWire’s 2017 report is the contemporaneous source for the seed funding and Redmond location.
How the drone inspection service was supposed to work
Capture images at hard-to-reach sites
Clobotics’ first stated market was wind-turbine inspection. The approach used custom-modified drones equipped with sensors to photograph turbine components that can be difficult to inspect directly.
Analyze images and flag maintenance issues
Computer-vision software compared the images and identified potential maintenance problems for follow-up. Clobotics described this as a full-service data offering, sometimes called “drone data as a service” (DDaaS), rather than simply selling drones. CEO and co-founder George Yan told GeekWire: “It’s not really the drone that’s totally interesting, it’s actually the data.”
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The distinction matters: the proposed business value was the workflow from image capture through analysis and issue reporting. The available reporting does not provide comparative performance measurements against manual or other inspection methods, so it does not establish that the service was faster, cheaper, or more accurate.
A separate $5 million round followed in 2018
On January 23, 2018, Clobotics announced a separate $5 million A+ financing round led by KTB Network, with GGV Capital and Capital Development Investment Fund (CDIF) participating. The company’s January 2018 release described the company as having its headquarters in Shanghai and an R&D center in Seattle. It also cited image recognition, 3D reconstruction, and autonomous drone flights as technical areas. Yan said in the release: “The ability to productionize and scale cutting-edge technology is the key to the success in an AI startup.”
This A+ round was not the 2017 seed round: both were reported as $5 million financings at different times, with different lead investors.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the expansion meant—and what it did not establish
GeekWire reported that Clobotics saw possible applications beyond wind turbines, including railways, power lines, bridges, highways, cellular towers, and retail inventory. These were potential extensions described at the time, not confirmation of current services or deployments. The same article cited 2016 wind installations of 23 gigawatts by Chinese utilities and 8.2 gigawatts in the United States; those figures were included as industry context, not as Clobotics customer or performance data.
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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →The company’s current company page says it was founded in 2016 and combines computer vision, robotics, and AI for enterprise physical operations. It lists Singapore as headquarters and offices in Bellevue, Shanghai, and Denmark. The page does not identify Bellevue as an R&D center, so the 2017 Redmond announcement should not be treated as proof that the same R&D operation remains there today.
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